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Friday, July 4, 2014

Orthodox Worship and the Old Testament Cultus

Recently I read in a blog a spirited
defence of Orthodox worship, which the author promoted as more Biblical than
the worship of contemporary praise services such as those offered at the famous
Willow Creek church (pictured above).I appreciated his zeal for the home team, as well as the fact that he
did not denounce “contemporary worship” (an odd phrase; isn’t all worship today
contemporary by definition?) as if it was heretically damnable or unclean.But in the course of his long defense of
Orthodox worship he tried to justify our praxis by drawing direct lines from
the worship pattern of the Old Testament to that of the contemporary Orthodox
Divine Liturgy.He said, for example, that
“worship in the Orthodox Church is patterned after the Old Testament
Temple. Typically, an Orthodox church has three main areas: the narthex
(entry hall), the nave (the central part), and the altar area. This is
similar to the Old Testament Tabernacle which consisted of the Outer Court, the
Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place”.He
also said, that the “vestments worn by Orthodox priests are patterned after the
Old Testament”.The result of all this
was that “Orthodox
Christian worship is based upon a radical continuity. As the Jewish
Messiah Jesus Christ took the Jewish forms of worship and filled them with new
content and meanings. Orthodox worship took the Jewish synagogue and
Temple worship and made them Christocentric.”

Reading
this, I could not suppress a grimace, for these claims are historically
untrue.As a matter of fact, the
architectural lay-out of a modern Orthodox church is not based on the Jewish shrine, even if both structures do have a
three-fold lay-out.In the Mosaic
shrine, the Outer Court was the place where worshipper and priest met and offered
the sacrifice, and the Holy Place was where the priest went to burn incense privately
twice a day, in the evening and the morning.No one went into the Most Holy Place except the high priest, and even he
only went there once a year on the Day of Atonement.If the Orthodox worship were really based on
the Old Testament model of Moses’ shrine, most of the worship would take place
in the narthex, with the clergy nipping in to the nave once in a while (for
Vespers and Matins?), and the bishop would enter the altar only once a year
(for the beginning of Lent?)Any reading
of church history will reveal that the Christian church buildings were not
based on the Jewish Temple or on any temple or religious building in the
ancient world, but on the secular meeting hall, the basilica, so-named because it was the public court building of the basileus or king, and the first secular
basilicas had no religious function at all.A temple was a building meant to house a deity; its worshippers, Jewish
or pagan, met and worshipped under the open sky.A basilica was meant to house people, and to
keep the weather off their heads.The
Christians could have structured their meeting places after a religious temple,
but they chose not to.Their buildings
were clearly secular in design and lay-out.

It
was the same with the vestments of the clergy.Historians tell us that the clergy officiated in their normal street
clothes even in the fourth century and later, though of course all the
Christians would wear their best street clothes when they came to public
worship.What we today regard as special
“church vestments” were simply the normal secular attire for the gentleman of
the day.Pagan priests wore special
clothes when they officiated at their public sacrifices, as did Jewish priests,
but the Christian clergy did not. As
time went on, fashions changed, but the church (ever conservative) clung to the
style of clothes their clergy had always worn.They fancied those clothes up a bit, making them more gorgeous and with
more brocade (as it were), but the clothes were never regarded in the early
years as special religious garments, much less as having any connection with
the priestly vestments of the Old Testament.As with architecture, so with clothing—the Church remained resolutely
non-religious in its approach.It is natural
for Orthodox Christians, especially if they come from Protestant traditions
determined to find a Bible-verse for everything, to look for patterns of
Orthodox worship in the Bible.But
historical facts are stubborn things, even when they prove inconvenient to one’s
argument.And the fact is that
historical Christian worship owes precious little to Old Testament patterns.

What
does this all mean?What connection then
do we have with the Old Testament?And
why did the Church decide to follow a secular approach to buildings and
clerical clothing rather than a religious one? (Please note that I am not suggesting that we today should worship in secular halls or that clergy should cease wearing special clerical vestments when they serve Liturgy.)

The
Church does have a connection with the Old Testament, but it is mediated
through Christ.That is, our direct
connection is not with the Old Testament tabernacle, shrine, sacrifices, and
priests, but with Jesus.All the Old
Testament realities find their fulfillment in Him.He is the new tabernacle, the new Temple, the
new dwelling place of God.His execution
on the Cross is the new sacrifice.The
priesthood of the Old Testament find its fulfillment not in the Christian
clergy, but in Christ’s high-priesthood in heaven.A priest by definition is one who offers a
sacrifice (i.e. presides over an actual death, usually the death of an animal), and so technically there is only one priest in the Church, and that
is Jesus, who offered His actual death to God on the cross.The term “priest” is applied
to the Christian liturgist (originally the bishop, and only later applied to
the presbyters) by a kind of poetic metaphor, since the clergyman does not actually immolate an animal. Rather, the bishop was the one who presided at the church’s worship, making anamnesis of Christ’s one and only
sacrifice, and so sacrificial language came to be applied to this liturgical
memorial.But all the Old Testament
liturgical practices pointed not directly to Christian worship, but to
Christ.

Thus
Orthodox Christian worship is based upon a radical discontinuity with the Old Testament.It did not take the Jewish Temple worship and
make it Christocentric.It did not take
the Temple worship at all.It took
Christ.Christ fulfilled these old
realities and transcended them, and Christian worship is heir to this
fulfillment and transcendence.Jewish
worship, like pagan worship, was essentially religious.That is, it consisted of what Paul called stoichea, the building blocks and
elemental concepts found in all religions—things like the distinction between
clean and unclean, holy day and secular day, consecrated ground and secular
space, priest and layman (see Galatians 4:9-10, Colossians 2:20-22).All these principles, all religion, were both
fulfilled in Christ and transcended.As
Fr. Alexander Schmemann famously said, Christ is therefore the end of religion,
and such religious concepts bind us no longer.We now belong no longer to the world with its stoichea, but to the Kingdom of God.That is why the church chose the secular
basilica as the model for its buildings, and why its clergy chose to dress in
normal, non-religious attire. Christians
no longer need religion.We have
something far better:we have Christ,
and in Him, we have all the realities of Israel’s sacred history.That not only beats the Jewish temple and its
priesthood.It also beats the passing
fads of places like Willow Creek.

Fr. Lawrence on Ancient Faith:

BUY the book

Fr. L. at oca.org

Followers

Father Lawrence Farley holds an M.Div.from Wycliffe College, Toronto School of Theology, and also completed a Certificate program at St. Tikhon's Seminary.

Since 1987 he has served as the pastor of St. Herman's Orthodox Church, OCA (Archdiocese of Canada) in Langley BC. Several priests, deacons, and lay members of new missions have emerged from the membership of St. Herman's.